Geographical distribution of German speakers
This article details the geographical distribution of speakers of the German language, regardless of the legislative status within the countries where it is spoken. In addition to the Germanosphere (German: Deutscher Sprachraum) in Europe, German-speaking minorities are present in many other countries and on all six inhabited continents.
"DACH" redirects here. Not to be confused with Dach (disambiguation).Mostly depending on the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties with a disputed status as separate languages or which were later acknowledged as separate languages (e.g., Low German/Plautdietsch[1]), it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language,[2][3][4] 10–25 million as a second language,[2][3] and 75–100 million as a foreign language.[2][5] This would imply approximately 175–220 million German speakers worldwide.[6]
Rest of the world[edit]
Minorities exist in the countries of Latin America and the former Soviet Union, as well as Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Namibia, Poland, Romania, South Africa, and the United States. These German minorities, through their ethno-cultural vitality, exhibit an exceptional level of heterogeneity: variations concerning their demographics, their status within the majority community, the support they receive from institutions helping them to support their identity as a minority.
Among them are small groups, such as those in Namibia, and many very large groups, such as the almost 1 million non-evacuated Germans in Russia and Kazakhstan or the near 500,000 Germans in Brazil (see: Riograndenser Hunsrückisch German), groups that have been greatly "folklorised" and almost completely linguistically assimilated, such as most people of German descent in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, the United States, and others, such as the true linguistic minorities (like the still German-speaking minorities in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, in Western Siberia or Hungary and Romania); other groups, which are classified as religio-cultural groups rather than ethnic minorities, such as the Eastern-Low German-speaking Mennonites in Belize, Mexico, Paraguay or in the Altay region of Siberia, and the groups who maintain their status thanks to strong identification with their ethnicity and their religious sentiment, such as the groups in Southern Jutland, Denmark or Upper Silesia, Poland.